Story Laundering: Fusion GPS, Fake News, Russians and Reporters

The media’s
real business is ‘story laundering’.

Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is
an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left
and Islamic terrorism.

"The
average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only
reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,"
Ben
Rhodes gloated.
"That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes,
the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had
pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a
journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the
journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily
manipulated useful idiots.

The
media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just
didn’t want outsiders to know it.

What
ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and
Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. What were the professional
reporters doing while Rhodes was manipulating the 27-year-olds? They
were working at places like Fusion GPS and ‘story laundering’
narratives to the kiddies.

The
media markets its investigative journalism chops even as
investigative journalism no longer fits into its business model.
Companies like Fusion GPS and political manipulators like Ben Rhodes
step into the vacuum by covertly providing them with the core
product. Much of the media is really in the business of ‘story
laundering’ by rewriting talking points, smears and hit pieces
from organizations like Fusion GPS.

The
readers get talking points served to them without ever knowing who
actually produced them. The forensic examination of the Trump
dossier answered some of these questions. Hillary Clinton hired
Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS hired a British former intelligence officer.
And he got his material from, among other sources, a Russian
intelligence officer. And they passed the material to the media and
the FBI.

It
took a great deal of effort, including a congressional subpoena, a
national scandal and the threat of impeachment, to peel back the
workings of the media and expose how the dossier sausage got made.
Most packaged media stories never receive this level of scrutiny.
And the media is quick to indignantly defend its lack of
transparency and reliance on anonymous sources in its Trump hit
pieces.

But
what the current controversy really reveals is the decline and fall
of the media.

The
media has outsourced story generation to the shadowy underworld that
produced the Trump dossier. Much as NPR
outsourced its coverage of
the Iran Deal to Ploughshares and the Iran Lobby in exchange for
$100K. This isn’t bias in the conventional sense. It’s native
advertising all the way. The media ‘rents’ space to outside
interests. It rewrites their stories in the house style and runs
them.

Sometimes,
like NPR, there’s a financial arrangement. Other times the media
gets stories that it lacks the resources and the time to generate on
its own. Or access. And sometimes it’s just a political alliance.

The
media is trying to cash in on the institutional legacy of the
corporations that bear the old names, but have no functional
resemblance to what the news business used to be. Today’s media
isn’t in the news business. Its outlets report the news only to
the degree that they have to. And when they do, they rely on viral
stories or rewriting an original report. The media’s real business
is serving as a clearinghouse for narratives. These clearinghouses
operate out of major urban power centers. They know next to nothing
about much of the country. And they don’t care. It’s why they
didn’t see Trump’s victory coming.

Trump
doesn’t just outrage the media politically. He’s a threat to
their business model. The media’s new business is political
gatekeeping as the intermediary between political interests and the
public. If you want to give Iran a blank check to develop its nukes,
touch off a panic over the environment or make anthem protests into
a trend, you go to the media. And then your business deal with Iran,
your solar panel investments or your hijacked family foundation
pushing black nationalist chic will thrive.

The
existence of President Trump undermines the media’s gatekeeping
powers. He is a living reminder that the media’s power is limited.
That’s why he has become the media’s number one target.

The
internet is the media’s other problem. Gatekeeping was easier when
broadcasting was expensive and hard. The media used Trump’s
victory to corral Facebook and Google, the big search and social
media companies, into letting them serve as the gatekeepers of
online news under the guise of fighting fake news. But the media’s
fake news crusade is entirely a consequence of its own corruption.

The
public turned to alternative news, both real and fake, because it
doesn’t trust the media. And the Trump dossier case is more
evidence that the media can’t be trusted. Everything from satire
sites to Russian influence operations thrive in the alternative
media space because there is no longer a consensus about truth or
ethics. And it’s the media that destroyed truth and ethics in
journalism.

As
the media moved from biased reporting to political gatekeeping, it
sharply narrowed the range of permissible opinions. Every story
became an ‘ad’ for one cause or another. Fewer stories existed
for their own sake. Instead each story promoted a political or
cultural agenda. Even if a story was not overtly political, a
political ‘advertisement’ of some kind had to be slipped in
there somehow.

Most
people didn’t realize that they were reading, watching and hearing
a bunch of non-stop political ads disguised in a thousand different
styles from reporting (“Gun Violence Strikes Again in American
City) to explainers (“10 Things You Need to Know About Gun
Violence”), but they found the product stifling and artificial.
When everything is an ad, then nothing feels real.

The
Russians were perfectly adapted to enter this space because the
media had become ‘Russian’. It was a collective propaganda organ
with close links to the government blasting identical content from
its interchangeable outlets. As in Russia, the public instinctively
distrusted the media. Different became authentic. The more
different, the more authentic.

And
instead of trying to regain public trust, the media decided to
censor the internet.

The
media wasn’t prepared for there to be a debate about the meaning
of ‘fake news’. It wants the power to define what ‘news’ and
‘fake news’ are. This is not the agenda of an institution
dedicated to public service, but of a cartel whose entire identity
is tied up with total control over a product.

The
product isn’t news. It’s narrative.

The
media is a narrative cartel. Forget the five Ws of journalism, who,
what, where, when and why. It isn’t interested in what happened.
It wants to make certain things happen. And when you want to make
things happen, you’re no longer an observer. You’re not the
fifth estate. You’re one of the first two.

And
so the media is in a power struggle with the White House not, as it
pretends, over access, transparency or truth, but over policy. And
it’s acting as a proxy in this power struggle for assorted
interests, some named and some nameless, as it did with Hillary’s
anti-Trump dossier.

The
media is no longer a journalistic institution. It’s a political
institution. It’s a component of a political infrastructure of
unelected officials, bureaucracies and institutions that controls
our government.

Fake
news, Fusion GPS, internet censorship and all the rest are symptoms
of this overriding problem.